• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.553-564
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• 2012

Tangible user interfaces have been developed in the area of Human-Computer Interaction for the last decades, however, the applied domains recently have been extended into the product design and interactive art. Tangible User Interfaces are the combination of digital information and physical objects or environments, thus they provide tangible and intuitive interaction as input and output devices, often combined with Augmented Reality. The research developed a design guideline for tangible user interfaces based on key properties of tangible user interfaces defined previously in five representative research: Tangible Interaction, Intuitiveness and Convenience, Expressive Representation, Context-aware and Spatial Interaction, and Social Interaction. Using the guideline emphasizing user interaction, this research evaluated installation in a science museum in terms of the applied characteristics of tangible user interfaces. The selected 15 installations which were evaluated are to educate visitors for science by emphasizing manipulation and experience of interfaces in those installations. According to the input devices, they are categorized into four Types. TUI properties in Type 3 installation, which uses body motions for interaction, shows the highest score, where items for context-aware and spatial interaction were highly rated. The context-aware and spatial interaction have been recently emphasized as extended properties of tangible user interfaces. The major type of installation in the science museum is equipped with buttons and joysticks for physical manipulation, thus multimodal interfaces utilizing visual, aural, tactile senses etc need to be developed to provide more innovative interaction. Further, more installation need to be reconfigurable for embodied interaction between users and the interactive space. The proposed design guideline can specify the characteristics of tangible user interfaces, thus this research can be a basis for the development and application of installation involving more TUI properties in future.